Perez Hilton is reporting that the Beastmaster was getting freaky at Sundance with the young lady in the photo above. And Perez (aka Mario Incontinentia) is acting all surprised, I guess because Bill is an elderly sourpuss geek and Perez can’t imagine that old white dudes like to bone cute girls. Yeah. Imagine that! Just shows how little Perez Hilton know about geeks. Perez no doubt figures that to be a freak you need to have purple hair and loads of shiny clothing and you need to act all outrageous in public. Truth is, the buttoned-down guys are the biggest freaks in the world. It’s all the repression. Go ask the hookers in any city where they’ve just had a Republican convention, or some kind of Promise Keepers meeting. The freak factor goes up by an order of magnitude during those weeks.

As for Bill, back in the 80s he was notorious at Comdex in Vegas for hitting on hacks and flacks alike, and he was always out there on the dance floor leaping around like a dirty weirdo. Reports back from women who dated him were either scary or hilarious, depending on your point of view and religious beliefs. Golden showers, donkey punches, the filthy Sanchez. Total nuthouse. Bill didn’t even bother trying to deny it. He told me once, Look, when you can get whatever you want, where’s the thrill? You have to go freaky because it’s the only way to get excited. You need to push the envelope.

Anyway, as it happens I was talking to Bill over the weekend.

He wanted to talk to me about the tablet, because of course the goons at the Borg have seen it and have been using it for a while, and Bill himself has been playing with one and he can totally see how huge it is, and I asked him what he’s been up to and if he ever misses being in the game, and he says no because he’s like on the verge of eliminating malaria from the planet and they’re also getting close to having a vaccine for AIDS and a bunch of other really bad diseases, plus he’s been cutting the infant mortality rate by 50 percent which means he’s saving millions and millions of lives, and he says as much as he loved doing technology it’s just nothing compared to saving people’s lives.

And I was like, Yeah, well, that’s cool too, I guess.

Because honestly I know he’s just so jealous of me right now and I don’t want to rub it in, and we all have to do our best to make Bill feel like what he’s doing is super-duper important. The truth is, come on, what is the point of saving people’s lives if they’re going to live on a dollar a day and never be able to afford even an iPod Shuffle, let alone an iPod Touch or an iPhone?

Bill asked me if I remembered this time back in like the early 80s when we were hanging out in Hawaii with Ann Winblad and Heidi Roizen and we were saying that if you could just keep stripping the PC down to its essentials, what you’d end up with would be just a screen, because eventually screens were going to be flat, not CRT, and eventually all the guts would get small enough that you could put them inside the flat screen, and eventually you could do away with the keyboard by using voice commands instead of typing. (So, okay, we were off on that one.) But eventually, we both figured, the computer would just be this very thin screen that you would carry with you in your briefcase, like a file folder. You’d just pull it out and it would come alive.

He was like, Remember that conversation? I remember it like it was yesterday. Only we thought it would happen by the late 90s, remember?

Well, I did remember that conversation, but as I recalled that evening at dinner it wasn’t that “we” were talking about this, it was that I was talking about it and he was just sitting there and rocking back and forth in his chair and occasionally writing something down on a napkin and tucking it into his pocket. But just to be polite, I say something lame to him like, Yeah, those were the days, huh?

Then he drops it on me. He says back then he got so excited about the idea that he put a team of Borgtards on a skunkworks project, even though he knew we were still decades away, just because he wanted to start looking at the challenges and figuring them out. And, he says, it turns out that back in the day those guys patented a lot of what they did, and he’s not saying we’re stepping on those patents but he’s got these lawyers at Microsoft who do nothing but snoop around and worry about stuff like this, and he just thinks it would be a good idea if our lawyers met with the Borg’s lawyers and we just made sure we’re all covered and cross-licensed and whatever.

I’m like, Dude, are you telling me you’re going to come in and try to take credit for my work? Again? Really? He says it’s not like that and we’re old friends and we have memories longer than the road that stretches on ahead, and anyway the Windows ecosystem would be coming out with dozens of slate computers over the next year or so, and even though most of them would just be craptastic frigtarded knock-offs of our machine sold at a slightly lower price point, nevertheless there was going to some competition and we should probably get all the legal stuff worked out in advance.

I told him I’d follow up with an email. Then I sent him a message that contained nothing but a link to this page.

Peace, Bill Gates.